I wanted to continue Melissa’s point about the popularity of the “revenge narrative” in music videos, yet a complete avoidance of domestic violence issues. It made me think of Blu Cantrell’s video “Hit ‘Em Up Style.” It is exactly how Melissa explained it: Blu’s man cheated, so therefore it’s OK to get back at him by destroying his property. Not only does she damage all of his possessions and spend his money, she encourages other women to do it too! It becomes a catchy girl power anthem.

Unfortunately, I also couldn’t find any other videos with women addressing the issue of domestic violence first-hand. However, it seems that we hear about women’s struggle from an unlikely source (more…)

I wanted to talk a little bit more about something I brought up in class today, about how women’s traditional gender roles in the U.S. involve upholding social and cultural mores, and possibly aiming to ‘better society,’ but never being explicitly political about it. I realized after class what I meant by ‘explicitly political’: placing the blame on someone. Politics is very much about finger-wagging, appeasing constituents, and placing the blame for something on somebody or something. Traditionally, it’s been more socially approved for women to try to ease society’s ills, e.g. the temperance movements of the late nineteenth century. Although women took on leadership roles in these organizations and argued in favor of women’s right to vote, their main focus was on maintaining the ‘traditional’ family structure (the Women’s Christian Temperance Union is strongly against same-sex marriage), not shaking up society. However, and I think this has something to do with us living in the post-9/11 era, when a woman blames someone explicitly for breaking up the family (and not just alcohol), there can be a severe backlash. Even flippantly critical comments like Natalie Maines’ can do that, but I think the best example in the current Bush presidency is Cindy Sheehan.

I’m sure you’ve heard of her; she’s the mother whose son died in the Iraq war, and became an anti-war protester, going so far as to camp outside President Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch for five weeks, insisting on speaking with him personally (which he never agreed to, though he did send top officials). I remember when this happened in the summer of 2005, and it just being all over the news. Surely a mother’s grief for her lost son is newsworthy. But Sheehan’s story only took the vitriolic, polarizing turn that it did, dominating the nightly news for the summer, because she took her traditionally social role as a mother and used it politically. Antiwar groups rallied against her because she was so beneficial to their cause, and Bush’s supporters criticized her for being ‘treasonous.’ Her critics didn’t question what she was saying–that the Iraq war wouldn’t make us any safer, and that she herself would fight to protect the country–rather, they questioned her. (more…)

As you may know, France’s presidential election took place recently. In a runoff between rightist Nicolas Sarkozy and socialist Segolene Royal, Sarkozy was chosen to replace Jacques Chirac, 53 to 47 percent. What’s relevant to ‘girl power’ is that Royal is a woman. I found this article, “France’s female voters shun Segolene Royal,” which makes the situation sound pretty bad. But the female vote for Royal wasn’t much different from the overall vote, with a 52 to 48 margin in favor of Sarkozy. Although Royal focused part of her campaign on appealing specfically to female voters ‘as a mother’ and promising greater equality (only 12% of French lawmakers are female), apparently female voters thought she focused on it too much. Some of the women interviewed say that they didn’t vote for Royal just because she’s a woman, because they didn’t think she was going to do anything for them or because she didn’t share the same vision for the country that they did.

There are two conflicting ways to look at the situation. On one hand, isn’t this what we want, for women to be seen as individuals (as ‘human’) and not just as women? But, do we really want that when it doesn’t work in their favor? Especially when it might not be working in their favor because the political system is still biased against them? And it seems that while Royal was criticized for showing too much identification with one demographic, that being women, she’s also criticized for (more…)

There have been newsstories in the past two days about government soliders in Somalia, which is currently in a state of civil war with explosions taking place recently in capital Mogadishu, taking women’s veils (ones where only the eyes are uncovered) and burning them. When I first heard about it, I thought it seemed like what happened in pre-1979 revolution Iran, when women weren’t allowed to dress in religious garb in an avowedly secular state ruled by a monarch, but it turns out that the recent veil-burning wasn’t government-sanctioned. The soliders did it because they wanted to make sure that the women weren’t part of the ‘rebel’ Islamist movement, and hiding bombs or weapons under their veils.

I thought this situation was interesting in its similarity to The Terrorist. Malli is valued within her organization because she’s a woman, which means that she is underestimated and seen in a de-politicized way, which will enable her to get past security checkpoints–while carrying the ammunition she needs in the basket on her head, and not firewood or whatever the soliders may assume it is, showing that it is precisely her femaleness that allows her to get by–and get close enough to the politician to assassinate him. It seems that the Somali soliders were concerned that they were letting Muslim women who might pose a threat get by because of their female religious need/desire to cover themselves modestly, and decided to take action, for their own safety presumably.

Something else that comes to mind is how this fits women into nationalism. (more…)

I can’t remember who made the comment about the post 911 reversion into a sort of white-boy southern American pride on Sunday’s class, but watching Shut up and Sing really got me thinking about Bush’s influence on aspects of our popular culture (more…)

There’s an interesting article in the New York Times today about the ‘fashion police,’ quite literally, in Iran. Ever since the 1979 Islamic revolution that made Iran an Islamic state, there have been certain policies about how women should dress in public (modestly, in the chador) that are enforced by the police. I think it’s important to note that before the 1979 revolution, Iran was an avowedly secular state, which meant that women actually weren’t allowed to publicly dress in ‘modest’ Islamic clothes. I think this just goes to show that in a state that has a lot of power over its citizens, women’s bodies are one of the tools used to enforce its ideology, no matter how seemingly ‘repressive’ or ‘liberal’ that ideology is.

Here are some of the bits from the article that I found particularly amusing: (more…)

In the Arts section of today’s NY Times, there was an article about the lack of female execs and even stars in pictures. We talked explicitly about this before in class, but the article literally says that there are often “women movies” or movies made explicitly for women. “They are nervous about the disappearance of many of the movie world’s most visible female power brokers and concerned that a box office dominated by seemingly male-oriented action films like “300” means less attention for movies that have obvious appeal to female audiences, 51 percent of moviegoers.” The article goes on to mention how we are in a “boys era” and how many female execs are losing out to male counterparts in vying for power roles in “a power play” or by not “meshing well” with athougher male execs. And, there has been a decline in the chick flick money market (or in my opinion the quality of writing in the films…but that isn’t said by the article). The end talks about how it is a lot less about character writing more about opening weekend and so special effects and action movies are what sells in the US and overseas. Anyway, this article is pretty much our class, and so a really interesting read.

Did anyone else notice how the cause Malli was fighting for was never really explained? I don’t even think we ever learned the country she was in (though it seemed clear it was India). The “Leader” remained nameless and so did the “VIP.” By leaving these kind of details ambiguous, The Terrorist(more…)

I thought it was interesting that despite the fact that the main character, Paikea (played by Keisha Castle-Hughes), was so much younger than the other leading female characters in the films we’ve seen so far, she still had so much in common with them: she’s a girl who has to be the very best in order to prove herself (similar to Girlfight), there’s also a boy (the one that farts during the performance at the beginning), and there’s the lack of a strong/respectable father figure (similar to Girlfight, Carrie, Tomb Raider 2).